I Wasn’t Hiding From You, Boss. I Was Just Being Productive.

I’m sitting here, alone, in HBR’s library, writing about how my decision to relocate from my open workspace is making me much more productive. It’s not merely because it’s quieter; research from Harvard Business School professor Ethan S. Bernstein suggests that employees can actually be more productive when they’re outside the gaze of their managers — and that being outside this gaze can, in the end, make your company more transparent. In one study, Bernstein hired Chinese-born Harvard undergrads to embed themselves as workers on a Chinese manufacturing floor. When managers were around, the frontline staff did everything by the book. When they weren’t, employees showed the Harvard students tricks they had developed to work faster, more easily, or more safely. Why didn’t they show their bosses these shortcuts? They didn’t want to rock the boat or take precious time away from doing the work in order to explain the work. “Everyone is happy,” explained one worker. “Management sees what they want to see, and we meet our production quantity and quality targets.”

In another study, “simply hanging a curtain increased production by 10 to 15 percent.” And while Bernstein is careful to say that companies shouldn’t just go around building walls, he does urge managers to note that “this race to full observability of everything can have unintended consequences.”

Oh, you think you have a management challenge? This remarkable and inspiring article by Matthieu Aikins follows a group of World Health Organization workers who are on a quest to eradicate polio — a disease that afflicted 223 people last year, down from 350,000 cases in 1988. Sure, it may seem as though they’re close to achieving their goal. But then there’s the small issue of trying to vaccinate children in the region where Afghanistan meets Pakistan, an area that’s tightly controlled by the Taliban. While Taliban leaders in Afghanistan have been more amenable to the program, those in Pakistan have not — 22 people have died after attacks on the vaccination program. Aikins traces both the history of how diseases like smallpox were eradicated amid Cold War tensions and the unique issues facing vaccinators today, including the hurdles that a 25-year-old woman named Rana faces as she manages seven teams charged with vaccinating 13,962 children during National Immunization Days.

Uri Friedman looks at the nuclear deal with Iran and sees a new era in Iran-U.S. relations, a development made possible not just by diplomatic negotiations, but by…YouTube? His argument is worth hearing out. Coming after decades of failed attempts at communication — including prank phone calls, snail mail, faxes (remember those?), and even a bizarre case in which a senior Iranian commander texted the Iraqi president and asked that the phone with the text message be handed to a senior member of the U.S. military – the disintermediating power of the internet has finally reached into the halls of power. Theoretically, governments already possessed the power to speak to their people. It was the first Roosevelt, after all, who called the U.S. presidency a bully pulpit. But today, when an Iranian leader can speak directly to the American people on YouTube, those international messages are less likely to get lost in translation. —Sarah Green

Enjoy this leaked email from Yahoo that begs – nay, pleads with, in rollicking and at times painfully annoying language — employees to please finally switch from Outlook to a Yahoo mail product for job-related work. The urgency? The company asked workers to make the move earlier this year and a mere 25% did, a fact that doesn’t bode well for the company and one of its signature products (email). After mocking Outlook — ”it doesn’t feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious piece of communications nirvana” – execs Jeff Bonforte and Randy Roumillat offer Outlook defectors the promise of early access to features. “Feeling that little tingle? Take a deep breath, you can do this,” the duo implores. Kara Swisher at AllThingsD finds the memo utterly delightful. Others declare it to be “rambling” and “one of the finest examples of interoffice literature ever leaked.” Get ready, Katie Couric.

Everyone knows there’s a big difference between someone who’s 12 and someone who’s 34, or even between an 18- and a 28-year-old. But for many marketing purposes, they all get lumped together as millennials, presumably more similar to one another than to Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. When Pepsi took a more-detailed look at millennials’ behavior during the recent MTV awards, though, it found a marked difference between the 18-to-26-year-old crowd and the 27-to-36-year-olds. The younger group shifted immediately from the TV to their smartphone screens during Miley Cyrus’s “twerk-tastic” duet, while their older counterparts just kept on watching, waiting until after the show to go on social media (perhaps suggesting that not all millennials make it a habit to carry their phones in their hands at all times, or maybe indicating something about how the romance of multitasking wanes with age).

Perhaps more important, Pepsi’s marketers discovered that the show’s appeal ebbed and flowed at different times for different groups, holding or failing to hold people’s attention in varying degrees. The lesson: It’s important to maintain a brand message throughout a show, rather than just in the traditionally more valuable (and pricier) beginning and end slots. —Andrea Ovans

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